Exercises for the Legs Without Machines (Video)

Not all exercises designed to strengthen your legs require the use of machines. Learn about exercises for the legs without machines with help from an expert with 15 years of experience in the fitness industry in this free video clip.

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I'm Jeremy Shore for Livestrong.com. And these are exercises for the legs without objects or machines. There are many ways to train the legs without the use of objects and machines by just utilizing your own body weight. I like to break up the way I target the legs into three categories stability, strength, and power. You can focus on one of these categories during a workout or create a workout by performing an exercise from each category. For our first stability exercise we are going to perform a single leg squat. Bring your hands onto your hips, stand tall. Light bend in your knees. Take your weight onto one foot keeping the opposite foot just off the ground. From here pushing your hips back keeping your chest up. Bend at the hip and knee as you lower down. Pausing at the bottom. Drive through the floor return to the starting position. Repeat. From there we can go to a single leg Romanian deadlift. From the same position taking the weight onto one foot, keeping the other foot off the ground. Keep this leg straight as you tip forward pushing your hips back. Reaching down towards the ground. Maintain a flat back. When you feel the catch on the back of that leg, drive through the floor return to the starting position. Tap down if you need to catch your balance. Repeat. Next move into a prisoner's squat to target more strength. We are going to bring our feet about hip to shoulder width apart. Bring our hands behind our head. In this position we'll hinge at the hips pushing our hips back. Dropping down to our thighs, they are about parallel to the ground. Keeping our chest up and gaze forward. And drive evenly through the floor with both feet returning to the starting position. Slow your descent and then produce force up. The next strength exercise will be lateral lunges. Hands can be in front of you, behind your head, or on your hips. As you lunge out to the side pushing your hips back. Sitting into the lunge. Return to the starting position. Lunge out to the opposite side. Keep the shoulder, knee, and foot in line. And load that lead foot fully. And drive through it to return to the starting position. Next we'll finish with some power movements starting with an alternating split jump. So get into a split stance or lunge position. We'll drop down with the back knee keeping our chest up. And then we'll explode up using our arms to help with momentum. Switching legs in the air lowering into the lunge on the opposite side immediately. And exploding up and out of that move alternating sides. We will finish with a power move called the squat jump. You can drop into a squat pushing your hips back. Reach our arms out in front of you keeping a full foot. Chest up and then explosively hop as your hands come along your sides. Moving to a triple extension at the ankles, knees, and hips, lifting the chest towards the ceiling. I'm Jeremy Shore for Livestrong.com and these have been exercises you can perform for your legs without objects or machines.